Great flexibility and advanced scalability

The flexible SWITCHengines academic community cloud allows you to use the computing and storage infrastructure

according to your needs

when you need them and

as long as you need them.

SWITCH provides both pay-as-you go for dynamic workload as well as longer-term usage models – with varying levels of discounts according to the volume and duration. For an overview of the available storage and compute resources click here.

Simple application and full integration

SWITCHengines are built in a way that fully integrates into the local infrastructures of your institution. Institutions can choose various levels of integration – according to their current and future needs. This includes:

direct integration into the SWITCHlan network

console for the integrated management of projects and users

transparent resource usage and cost monitoring

SWITCHengines is created together with Swiss universities and related institutions (such as spin-offs, research institutions or hospitals) to create the best “integrated solution” for your needs.

Pricing information for Swiss Academia

Basic infrastructure for funded projects

Projects funded by swissuniversities' program "P-5 Scientific information" can use the compute and storage services created by this project free of charge. Projects can be accommodated within the limits of available capacity until August 2018 (subject to agreement with SWITCH).

Data lifecycle management (DLCM)

Currently the University of Geneva, which is responsible for the national long-term preservation infrastructure, is working on the architecture and its proof of concept (POC) of an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) compliant system. For that, there is a need to benefit from cloud services such as proposed by SWITCHengines. The POC of that system is realized on SWITCHengines.

National e-Infrastructure link for Switzerland (NeI-CH)

The NeI-CH project has started to run physics related computations on the cloud infrastructure. The simulations are tested for their fitness to the cloud infrastructure also with regard to particularities and new possibilities compared to the traditional HPC environments.

-> Subproject TmLQCD (Twisted Mass Lattice QCD)

TmLQCD is a Hybrid Monte Carlo implementation for Wilson and Wilson twisted mass fermions and inverter for different versions of the Dirac operators, is fully parallelised and tested successfully on various modern architectures.The goal of this exercise is to make some exploratory studies on the features of particles on low-energy regions.

-> Subproject GEANT

Geant4 (Geometry and Tracking) is a platform for simulation of passage of particles through matter. It is a standard tool for design and simulation of particle physics detectors, also used in medical and space physics applications. The outcome of this exercise will be a master thesis on muon background simulation for a neutrino experiment. The general Geant4 image created, can in the future be used in other applications.

-> Subproject ATLAS Simulation

The ATLAS Simulation is also based on Geant4. The detector geometry is described and the interactions of the particles with the different layers of the detector is simulated. This is included in the general ATLAS software framework (Athena). The outcome of the exercise is to produce real simulated events as part of the general ATLAS Monte Carlo simulation campaign. This requires the transparent integration of the ATLAS framework with the cloud infrastructure.